French Lit, Stripes and Cigarettes at Sonia Rykiel

The new Sonia Rykiel store on the Upper East Side.CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

By Molly Young

March 22, 2016

Like procreating or planting flowers or even just exfoliating your skin with a washcloth, spring cleaning is a process of renewal that is available, in some form, to every human on earth.

It’s also a shared experience that can be profoundly solitary: We clean and declutter alone, even if we do it alongside friends or family. Only you, after all, are equipped to make a decision about the memorabilia that haunts your closet — the striped shirt swiped from a college boyfriend 10 years ago, the vintage Mongolian fur hat that makes you look demented or fanciful depending on your coat, the questionable brogues.

I cleaned out my closet last week and, in a torrent of frenzied decontamination, went overboard with the purging and donating.

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CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

When I finished, every streak of color was gone. The remaining clothes were white, beige or black. My closet looked like a hotel lobby bathroom. It had a soporific effect. It needed seasoning.

What to do?

Why, add a few spicy morsels, of course. The new Sonia Rykiel store uptown seemed like a potential source of invigorating agents. The French label is known for its kicky striped knitwear, a look popularized by Ms. Rykiel in the early 1960s.

In 2014, Julie de Libran was appointed artistic director after the label waffled in the wake of its founder’s departure as creative director. Ms. de Libran has injected fresh life with her playful, print-happy collections.

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CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

Now she has opened a store on Madison Avenue — and not just a store, but a grand gesture: 2,000 square feet of stomping ground on one of the ritzier blocks in Upper East Side shopping territory, right across from Lanvin and Dolce & Gabbana.

With its apple-red lacquered walls and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the store is eye-catching in a way that makes passers-by halt, whip off their sunglasses and peer inside. The air is scented with a rosewater-tinged infusion (“It comes in through the air-conditioners,” a saleswoman whispered), and the shelves are stocked with vintage paperbacks by Françoise Sagan, Stendhal, Victor Hugo and André Malraux.

A custom carpet is woven with cartoonish books, pencils, eyeballs, lips and cigarettes, which is the first time in years that I’ve seen a non-cigarette brand acknowledge the existence of cigarettes. (An American version of this carpet would feature an iPhone, a green juice and a turmeric supplement. I like Rykiel’s rendition.)

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CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

The clothing stands up to its environment. I zoomed in on a rack of grapefruit-size pompoms made from turkey feathers dyed in acid-trip hues: banana, fern, cerulean ($220). The pompoms were affixed to either a silk ribbon or an oversize safety pin. They weighed nothing.

“How would a person wear this?” I asked a saleswoman.

“On the runway, they wore them on the wrist,” she said, demonstrating the accessory’s placement like a flight attendant miming safety procedures. “Or you can wear them in your hair” (she mimed this, too), or on a bag (mimed) or — this is my favorite place — right on your shoulder.”

In theory the shoulder seems like an odd place for a single pompom, but the saleswoman’s demonstration was compelling.

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CreditJennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

“I love fuzzy things,” she said.

Me, too.

Other items offered a similarly multisensory experience, like a pair of glitter-encrusted tennis shoes ($425) and a fluttering pleated dress ($2,190) in creamsicle polyester (though it should have been chiffon, at that price).

A tweedy cropped jacket with rainbow stripes ($1,490) looked edible on the rack — like precisely the right element to wear with jeans or to work over a silk dress — and the saleswoman slid it onto my shoulders. I had been semiconsciously shedding layers and she had correctly interpreted the momentum of my stripping. I looked in the mirror. Oh, dear. On a taller person, the fit would have been slouchy. I looked like a garden gnome.

“Maybe with slimmer pants, it would work,” I thought. “Maybe with some tailoring.” But the tailoring would need to be intensive. I bid goodbye to the jacket and assured myself that I could always return to it online. You can find most of the store’s items online, though Rykiel’s e-commerce presentation is a low-fat plain-yogurt version of the store’s ice cream sundae.

“Sonia Rykiel has made uncomplicated clothes for the complicated modern woman,” a writer said in a 1982 profile in The New York Times. This is still true (a buffet of fine-knit striped Rykiel sweaters would sate any traditionalist), although the target woman may skew younger in 2016. A well-financed woman could buy a lot of fun but not-inappropriate gifts here for her teenage daughter or niece.

This occurred to me as a woman and her teenage daughter wandered inside. The teenager moved pompomward. Her mother gazed at the store’s vast array of books.